During the process of taking this module I learned about how a photographer has to think when taking the photo. What message do I want to convey? What do I want to stand out? Do I want the picture candid or staged? I never thought about things like these when taking a picture. I wanted my general theme to be happiness. As I was taking these pictures I noticed that the theme could have changed. Which is why my theme is a mixture of happiness and making yourself happy.

For the first week of taking pictures, we were able to choose a theme for the picture. Keeping in mind that I wanted my theme to tie into happiness, I took a picture of me and one of my friends hugging and posing in front of our school. I chose this picture to be part of my theme because I thought it was a really simple picture that did a pretty good job at expressing the theme. If you interpret the picture more, and think of the theme making yourself happy, you could see how the picture goes with the theme. This picture is different from the rest of my photos because this is a staged photo and I told my friend my theme and we tried to pose for the camera so when the picture was taken it would connect with the theme. 

For this photograph I am not in this picture because I wanted the rest of my photos to be more candid. I accomplished this by taking a picture of my friend who gets coffee everyday. In the process of thinking of how I’m going to do this photo, I thought about one of my friends and thinking about what puts her in a good mood, buying herself a coffee. I took this picture as a candid, I didn’t want to tell her about my theme so I could get a more natural picture of her purchasing her coffee. I thought that this style of photography was better for my theme because you could really capture the moment when someone is happy instead of forcefully making someone smile for a camera.There isn’t a message for this picture since the theme for this picture was Photojournalism, and I decided to take a picture of something a person does on the daily. But the story behind it is that she buys herself something to put herself in a good mood. This relates to my theme because she is purposely doing something to make herself happy.

This is probably one of my favorite photos. In this picture it’s pretty obvious to see what the two subjects are doing, Two of my friends watching something funny on a phone and laughing. I chose this picture because of what happened during the process of taking this picture. My purpose was to make them look like they are having a good time together and then one of my friends showed her a funny video and that resulted in a really good candid photo. I thought that this was my most successful photo because I was going to make my friends have a staged reaction but It ended up not being staged. This matches with my overall theme because this shows that my friends were making themselves happy by purposely watching a funny video. I thought that my theme of happiness really was shown in this picture.

For my fourth picture I want to really express the theme of happiness and making yourself or others happy. For this picture I’m outside of school and my friend is taking a bunch of candids of me spinning on a chair. The story behind this photo is, I was doing a bunch of random silly things to make others laugh SO my friend helped me by taking a bunch of candids and I chose this one because it was a picture that expressed the emotion of happiness really well.
Taking these pictures was fun for me because in every picture I tried to capture a happy moment. The message I want to convey through these photos is that people can make themselves happy in any situation. What I really wanted to stand out is the reaction of people in the pictures. I thought that the reaction would stand out especially if it were candid pictures which is why I chose most of my pictures to be candid.